School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 64 families who named St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 203 and 266 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Derbyshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.

1.31

first choices for every place available

266 first preferences for 203 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Derbyshire as a whole and cover every state-funded school in the authority. Anyone quoting you odds for a named school is making them up.

Across Derbyshire, 29.8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 185 of 620 appeals heard in 2024–2026. The England figure is 20.1%.

A panel is not deciding whether you want the school. It decides whether the admission arrangements were lawful and correctly applied, and then whether the harm to your child of not being admitted outweighs the harm to the school of going over its published number. Cases built on preference rather than on those two questions are the ones that fail.

See the full appeal figures for Derbyshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Derbyshire ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.

How contested this school has been

St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.16 per place 216 first choices 187 places 2016/17 1.2 per place 238 first choices 198 places 2017/18 1.16 per place 233 first choices 201 places 2018/19 1.2 per place 242 first choices 202 places 2019/20 1.27 per place 254 first choices 200 places 2020/21 1.28 per place 259 first choices 203 places 2021/22 1.14 per place 238 first choices 208 places 2022/23 1.06 per place 219 first choices 207 places 2023/24 1.1 per place 228 first choices 207 places 2024/25 1.25 per place 250 first choices 200 places 2025/26 1.25 per place 257 first choices 206 places 2026/27 1.31 per place 266 first choices 203 places
First preferences per place at St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 266 first preferences for 203 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 187 216 186 1.16
2016/17 198 238 195 1.2
2017/18 201 233 200 1.16
2018/19 202 242 201 1.2
2019/20 200 254 194 1.27
2020/21 203 259 201 1.28
2021/22 208 238 202 1.14
2022/23 207 219 197 1.06
2023/24 207 228 204 1.1
2024/25 200 250 199 1.25
2025/26 206 257 206 1.25
2026/27 203 266 202 1.31

Places offered

203

in 2026/27

Named first choice

266

475 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75.9%

202 of 266

Offers to families outside the council

5%

11 of 203 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy published for 2026 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy, 2026 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Catholic looked after and previously looked after children (see note 2 and 3).
2 Catholic children who live in one of our Parishes or attend one of our family of primary schools (see notes 3 and 4 below and the two lists at the top of this page).
3 All other Catholic children and members of an Eastern Christian Church (see notes 3 and 5).
4 Other looked after and previously looked after children. (see note 2)
5 Children of other Christian denominations and children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion or other religious leader who have attended one of our family of primary schools (see notes 6 and 7).
6 All other children of other Christian denominations and children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion or other religious leader (see notes 6 and 7).
7 Any other children who have attended one of our family of primary schools.
8 Any other children not in any of the above categories. Within each of the categories listed above, the following provision will be applied.
(i) The attendance of a brother or sister at the school at the time of application and enrolment will increase the priority of an application within each category so that the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made (see note 8).

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2026 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy's determined admission arrangements for 2026 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

Was the school full?

This is the question a panel spends most of its time on. At the second stage of an appeal it weighs the harm to the school of taking an extra child against the harm to your child of being refused — and how much room the school has is the heart of that. The admission authority has to show harm over and above the fact that its published number has been reached, so it is fair to ask what the specific harm is — how the second stage actually works.

Places, Years 7 to 11

991

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,030

103.9% of capacity

Over its capacity by

39

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

290

excluded from the figures above

Read this before you use these numbers

These are whole-school figures across Years 7 to 11, not the year group you are appealing for. A school can hold spare places in its upper years while the year you want is genuinely full, and the panel will have the year-group numbers in front of it. So this does not show that St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy has room for your child.

They are also the school's own reported capacity, as at 1 May 2025 — a year behind the application figures further up this page, and a description rather than a finding.

On the published figures St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,260 places 1,271 on roll 2013/14 1,260 places 1,275 on roll 2014/15 1,260 places 1,262 on roll 2015/16 1,238 places 1,254 on roll 2016/17 1,238 places 1,266 on roll 2017/18 1,260 places 1,290 on roll 2018/19 1,260 places 1,293 on roll 2020/21 1,238 places 1,342 on roll 2021/22 1,238 places 1,383 on roll 2022/23 1,238 places 1,346 on roll 2023/24 1,238 places 1,347 on roll 2024/25 1,281 places 1,351 on roll
Whole-school figures including any sixth form, as at 1 May each year. 2019/20 is missing because the 2020 School Capacity survey was cancelled.

Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Derbyshire

Postcode S41 8AG. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138470).

Other contested secondary schools in Derbyshire

Applications and offers: Department for Education, Primary and secondary school applications and offers, school-level file, 2026/27. Appeal figures: Admission appeals in England. Both under the Open Government Licence.